"

"Well, I like SHEEP, then," said Maud; "I don't really see how we can
stop it."

"I suppose it's the seamy side of marriage!" said Howard.

Maud looked at him for a moment, and then, getting up from her chair
and coming across to him, she put her hands on his shoulders and looked
in his face.

"Are you VEXED?" she said in rather a tragic tone.

"No, of course, not vexed," said Howard, catching her round the waist.
"What an idea! I am only jealous of everything which seems to come in
between us, and I have seemed to see you lately through a mist of oddly
dressed females. It's a system, I suppose, a social system, to enable
people to waste their time. I feel as if I had got caught in a sort of
glue--wading in glue. One ought to live life, or the best part of it,
on one's own lines. I feel as if I was on show just now, and it's a
nuisance."

"Well," said Maud, "I am afraid I do rather like showing you off and
feeling grand; but it won't go on for ever. I'll try to contrive
something. I don't see why you need be drawn in. I'll talk to Cousin
Anne about it."

"But I am not going to mope alone," said Howard. "Where thou goest, I
will go. I can't bear to let you out of my sight, you little witch! But
I feel it is casting pearls before swine--your pearls, I mean."

"I don't see what to do," said Maud, looking rather troubled. "I ought
to have seen that you hated it."

"No, it's my own stupid fault," said Howard. "You are right, and I am
wrong. I see it is my business at present to go about like a dancing
bear, and I'll dance, I'll dance! It's priggish to think about wasting
one's sweetness. What I really feel is this. 'Here's an hour,' I say,
'when I might have had Maud all to myself, and she and I have been
talking about the weather to a pack of unoccupied females.'"

"Something comes of it," said Maud. "I don't know what it is, but it's
a kind of chain. I don't think it matters much what they talk about,
but there is a sort of kindness about it which I like--something which
lies behind ideas. These people don't say anything, but they think
something into one--it's alive, and it moves."

"Oh, yes," said Howard, "it's alive, no doubt. It would amuse me a good
deal to see these people at home, if I could just be hidden in the
curtains, and hear what they really talked about, and what they really
felt. It's when they have their armour on that they bore me. It is not
a pretty armour, and they don't wear it well; t